There are many sports that require the use of helmets such as football, baseball, bicycle riding, hockey, motor sports, and the like. All of these helmets differ in their overall appearance and function, but share the common goal of protecting the user's head from impact. Different areas of coverage, padding, internal suspension, and even the materials used all share the common goal of providing impact protection. These same protective properties are also important in helmets used in medical, construction, military, and law enforcement activities as well. Manufacturers and researchers are constantly on the lookout for new materials, applications, and processes to enhance the safety properties of their protective helmets. A persistent problem facing many manufacturers and researchers is developing a helmet that is more conforming to a user's head so as to substantially attenuate, or even obviate, secondary impact without adding significant costs to the production of the helmet. Accordingly, there exists a need for a means by which the protective properties of helmets can be enhanced to further their injury preventing characteristics. The development of the present invention fulfills this need.
The method of manufacture and design of the helmet of the present invention provides for a customization of the helmet, enabling fine tuning, to ensure fabricating a sufficient first shock absorbing layer by avoiding undesirable characteristics of prior art prefabricated helmets. The undesirable characteristics of prior art helmets are a mismatch, leading to the existence of air gaps, between the liner portion of the helmet and the user's cranium shape. In fact, these air gaps can create a secondary impact between the liner and the cranium, resulting in localized high impact loads of the surface areas of contact. The methods and designs of the present invention provide a cost effective method of fabricating helmets with helmet liners that substantially reduce, or obviate, secondary impact occurrences while simultaneously reducing the required thickness of the helmet layers affording impact protection. The custom helmet design of the present invention reduces the need for excessive comfort foam found in prior art helmets. The first shock absorbing layer of the present invention is custom formed to match the wearer's head, where the customization method relies on measuring and mapping the user's head using a variety of digital scanning methods. The same processes are then applied to the interior of the helmet structure. The interior of the helmet shell may also be defined with a three-dimensional CAD model used to build high volume manufacturing tools. Next, using a variety of manufacturing methods such as sculpting, additive/subtractive, machining, or the like, a protective liner is fabricated. When used in a helmet with the respective user, an exact fit is formed, thus preventing any movement of the user's head in a manner that reduces injury upon any impact.
Prior art in this field consists of helmet designs that rely upon excessive cushion layers to provide the requisite protection. Some prior art methods of fabricating such helmet designs are elaborate and costly, and rarely result in proper cranium contour and profile matching, which exacerbates the above-fore-mentioned problems.
It is an objective of the present invention to provide a customization method for a helmet that allows for fine tuning to ensure fabricating a sufficient first shock absorbing layer by avoiding undesirable characteristics such as an excessively sized second outer shell, an excessive offset of the molded liner, an extra thick second impact absorbing layer, an extra thick soft second comfort layer, excessive air contained within bladder portions (if so equipped), and large air gaps between the molded liner and the user's cranium.
It is further objective of the present invention to provide a helmet design and method of fabrication for the customized helmet and helmet liner allows for a customized composite helmet liner that can be incorporated into existing and new helmet designs resulting in significantly enhanced comfort, stability, and shock absorption safety.
It is a further objective of the present invention to afford a user better control of positioning and simpler donning and doffing of the helmet via the use of the custom liner.
It is a further objective of the present invention to provide a helmet design and method of fabrication resulting in low-cost manufacturing comparable to prior art prefabricated helmets due to prefabricated segments stored in bins of the helmet liner of the present invention, which are stored by size, shape, and material.
It is a further objective of the present invention to enable unique helmet designs and a fully customized interface between the helmet liner and the user's cranium, applicable to a wide range of protective helmets, through the use of the disclosed method of fabrication.